Public Protest as a Claim to Citizenship: Twentieth-Century Occupations of Washington, D.C. and Their Role in Public Memory

Crawford-Lackey, Katherine Middle Tennessee State University ProQuest Dissert 2020 해외박사(DDOD)

The National Park Service (NPS) serves as the steward of many of the nation’s most significant landscapes, including the civic spaces in the District of Columbia. Not only is this federal agency responsible for preserving public lands, it is also tasked with interpreting the natural and cultural importance of its over 400 units. As caretaker and storyteller of federal lands, the NPS directly participates in shaping public perceptions about the past. The agency, however, has struggled to adequately interpret the stories of all Americans, particularly those who challenged federal authority. To better understand the National Park Service’s process for interpreting contested narratives, this dissertation analyzes two twentieth-century occupation protests that took place on Park Service land in the capital. I consider the NPS’s role in facilitating and later interpreting the Bonus Army March, during which World War I veterans occupied Anacostia flats (1932), and the Poor People’s Campaign, which included the construction of a small city on the National Mall (1968). Both demonstrations took place over the span of several weeks, making them unique and unprecedented events in the social landscape of protest. Examining the history of these political protests in the context of the agency’s interpretive pedagogy and practice, this study uses unexamined primary sources and oral histories conducted by the author to examine how Washington, DC and its public lands function as a platform for making claims to citizenship. Interviews with NPS park rangers, chiefs of interpretation, and superintendents, illuminate the legacy of the Bonus Army and Poor People’s Campaign demonstrations, document how parks are interpreting this legacy, and guide recommendations for creating interpretation that entails a more inclusive historical process.

A School-Wide Approach: Teachers’ Perceptions of Teaching English Language Learners in the Mainstream Classroom

Brown, Jacob D Middle Tennessee State University ProQuest Dissert 2020 해외박사(DDOD)

Teachers face more challenges in today’s classroom than were faced 20 years ago. The rise of English Language Learners (ELLs) in American schools continues to grow, with 21% of the K-12 student population being ELL (NYU, 2018). With this drastic increase, schools are challenged to meet the diverse academic, social, and emotional needs that these students have. ELL specialists can provide support in these areas; however, the percentage of ELL specialists in most schools is not enough to adequately meet the needs of the ELL population. Because of this factor, ELL students are being primarily served in the mainstream classroom. These mainstream classroom teachers are struggling to adequately meet the needs of the ELL students they serve daily, mainly because most have not received any type of specialty training or support with this special population. If teachers are to best meet the needs of ALL learners, then action must take place; leaders must identify the primary struggles that teachers are experiencing, and prepare a list of resources and training opportunities to support the needs at their schools. Keywords: ELL, Mainstream ELL Instruction, ELL Strategies.

A District’s Approach to Support Teacher Agency through Teacher-Led Professional Development

Skaggs, Cara C Middle Tennessee State University ProQuest Dissert 2020 해외박사(DDOD)

School districts invest large amounts of time and budgetary costs to provide professional development to support the professional growth of teachers each year. Although districts are providing professional learning that is appropriate in both content and delivery, studies still show teachers do not experience professional learning to support their professional growth. One missing link to the puzzle may be teacher agency. Teachers who have agency take ownership of their learning to meet their goals and to help others also meet their goals. A mixed methods study was utilized to explore how teacher-led professional development provided by a local school district supports the professional growth of teachers with conditions that support teacher agency. The study found the district has conditions in place to support teacher agency but supporting teacher agency does not automatically remove all the challenges associated with professional learning. The results of the study also determined more research is needed to understand and support teacher agency as well as districts must hire leaders who believe in professional learning.

Numerical Approximations for the Fractional Laplacian in Space-Fractional Reaction-Diffusion Equations

Alzahrani, Saham Middle Tennessee State University ProQuest Dissert 2020 해외박사(DDOD)

The systems of non-linear time-dependent space-fractional differential equations have been employed to model important physical phenomena in many fields of engineering and science. The analytical solutions of most of these systems are unknown, and evaluating an analytical solution for some fractional differential equations is complicated and difficult to calculate because it is in the trigonometric series form. Thus, developing numerical solutions for such nonlinear systems is essential. There have been growing interests recently to develop efficient and robust numerical schemes for solving the nonlinear systems of fractional differential equations. In this study, several novel numerical schemes are proposed to solve the systems of multidimensional non-linear space-fractional reaction-diffusion equations efficiently. The non-local nature of the fractional operator adds new features to the mathematical models but also introduces additional difficulties in their implementation where large, dense matrices are required at each time step. To overcome this challenge, the Fourier spectral approach is applied to discretize the fractional Laplacian. This approach gives a diagonal representation of the fractional operator while achieving spectral convergence and the implementation to multi-dimensions is similar to one-dimensional problems. Since this approach lacks capability to implement on nonhomogeneous boundary conditions, a second-order matrix transfer technique (MTT) for non-homogeneous boundary conditions is used for the space discretization. A fourth-order MTT based on a compact scheme is also employed for the discretization of the fractional Laplacian. To deal with the nonlinearities, exponential time differencing schemes (ETD) are employed for the reason that while the approaches achieve the expected accuracy, solving nonlinear systems at each time step is no longer needed. The Fourier spectral approach is combined with two second-order ETD schemes to solve space-fractional reaction-diffusion equations with non-smooth initial data and is also combined with a forth-order ETD scheme to provide highly efficient solutions for multidimensional systems. The second-order MTT is combined with the forth-order ETD scheme to solve problems with non-homogeneous boundary conditions. Moreover, the fourth-order compact scheme MTT is combined with forth-order ETD schemes to show the effectiveness of the L-stable scheme when the initial data is non-smooth and to illustrate that the A-stable scheme is not reliable for some time steps. A novel reliability constraint is introduced to avoid the oscillations present in the solutions when the A-stable scheme is employed. Theoretical and numerical investigation of the convergence and stability of the numerical schemes have been discussed. Extensive numerical experiments are performed on wide well-known systems of time-dependent space-fractional reaction-diffusion equations to demonstrate the reliability, efficiency and accuracy of the developed schemes.

The Impacts of Student-Level and School-Level Factors on Students’ Reading Achievement: An Application of Hierarchical Linear Modeling

Wang, Qian Middle Tennessee State University ProQuest Dissert 2020 해외박사(DDOD)

Reading achievement of students is one of the most significant predictors of their academic performance and competitiveness in society. Researchers have been investigating the reading achievement related factors for decades from different aspects. This study aimed to examine relevant factors that are associated with reading achievement from both the student and school levels. The student-level factors included English language proficiency (ELL), students’ reading motivation, and students’ home resources. The school-level factors included school SES, teacher’s characteristics, school literacy readiness, and grade-level reading proficiency. A large-scale data set of 3,001 fourth-grade students from 133 elementary schools in the United States was included in the current study. The dataset was part of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2016 international public database. Considering the nested structure of the dataset, Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) was utilized to analyze the impacts of student- and school-level predictors on the fourth-grade students’ reading achievement simultaneously. The results indicated that the factors at student level were all significantly predicting reading achievement. The inclusion of student-level predictors reduced 8.3% of the total variance in reading achievement. The results also showed that school SES and grade-level reading proficiency were significant predictors of reading achievement at school level, whereas the later predictor demonstrated extremely weak predictive capacity in the prediction. The variations in the intercepts of different schools were explained by school-level factors and the vast majority of the 13% of the total variance in reading achievement was accounted for by school SES. In addition, the full model with both student- and school-level predictors made significant improvement compared to the unconditional model and student-level model by providing the best model-fit. The educational implications for improving reading achievement and limitations were discussed as well.

Filtering of Transient and Low-Level Mitochondrial Damage Signals by the PINK1:Parkin Mitophagy Pathway

Bowling, J. Logan Middle Tennessee State University ProQuest Dissert 2020 해외박사(DDOD)

Mitophagy describes a collection of pathways that direct the selective autophagic removal of damaged or superfluous mitochondria within eukaryotic cells. Of these, the PINK1 (PTEN-induced putative kinase 1):Parkin mitophagy pathway is perhaps the best known and is responsible for marking depolarized mitochondria for destruction. PINK1 continuously surveils mitochondrial membrane potential (MMP), an indicator of mitochondrial health, and is stabilized at mitochondria that exhibit a significant loss in MMP, and recruits cytosolic Parkin. Together PINK1 and Parkin assemble phospho-polyubiquitin (ppUB) chains on outer mitochondrial membrane (OMM) substrates, thereby tagging those mitochondria for removal by autophagy. This is accomplished through the binding of autophagy receptors, such as optineurin (OPTN), to ppUb chains which facilitates the recruitment of the autophagosome and subsequent degradation of the mitochondrion. The topology of the PINK1:Parkin pathway is complex and contains several feedback loops, including a coherent feed-forward loop between PINK1, Parkin, and ppUb. It is believed that this network motif may create a delay in ppUb chain assembly, such that only mitochondria which demonstrate a near-complete and continuous loss in MMP are successfully autophagized. However, mitochondria are likely to experience a range of insults and stresses in vivo, particularly in aged cells, and it is unclear how the PINK1:Parkin pathway might interpret the resultant time-varying changes in MMP. In this study we investigate this in detail by carefully manipulating MMP in live cells through titration of the reversible protonophore carbonyl cyanide m-chlorophenyl hydrazine (CCCP), and measuring the dynamics of PINK1 and Parkin mitochondrial recruitment and loss by fluorescence microscopy. These data show that PINK1 is highly sensitive to fluctuations in MMP and rapidly dissociates when MMP is even partially restored. Conversely, Parkin dissociation and ppUb chain disassembly from repolarized mitochondria is comparatively slow and thus allows pulses of mitochondrial PINK1 to drive a step-wise accumulation of Parkin and ppUb. This nuanced view of the pathway proposes a model whereby mitochondria that do not exhibit large and persistent losses in MMP, but still pose a threat to overall cellular health, can be removed by PINK1 and Parkin activity.

Early Modern Nuns and the Preservation of Medieval Manuscripts: Anne Cary and Julian's Long Text

Wolfe, Sarah Elizabeth Middle Tennessee State University ProQuest Dissert 2023 해외박사(DDOD)

Catholic women religious who fled England with their communities during the dissolution of the monasteries (1536-41), many of whom were practicing scribes and writers, have not received the extensive scholarly attention for their cultural contributions that their Protestant counterparts have been afforded. Living in France, the Low Countries, and Portugal, the communities of exiled English nuns endured war, economic hardship, and isolation from their extended families at home in England. As the sixteenth century progressed to the seventeenth, among leading thinkers, poets, and philosophers, religious and cultural divisions mingled, multiplied, and emerged more sharply. In England, Jesuit poet Robert Southwell (?1561-95) influenced authors such as Catholic-born, increasingly anti-Jesuit John Donne (1572-1631) and Catholic convert Richard Crashaw (1612/1613-49). In France, Blaise Pascal (1623-62), influenced by Jansenism (centered at the convent of Port-Royal, which he entered in 1655), composed his Lettres provinciales (1656-7) attacking Jesuit casuistry, Fenelon, Francois de Salignac de la Mothe (1651-1715), archbishop of Cambrai (from where a group of English nuns moved to Paris) promulgated Quietism, a spiritual practice condemned by Rome. Civil Wars stemming from confessional divides in England and France affected the early modern populace by creating unrest and overall cultural instability. Despite suffering difficulties while living in foreign countries, the displaced communities of English nuns thrived culturally. Scholars such as Caroline Bowden, Laurence Lux-Sterritt, Jaime Goodrich, and Jenna Lay have examined chronicles, life-writing, death-notices, and correspondence to deepen understanding of the lives of exiled women religious and their works. Building on this research, my study further contextualizes seventeenth-century English Benedictine Anne Cary (1614-71) and the copy of Julian of Norwich’s Long Text preserved in Anne Cary’s convent Our Lady of Good Hope in Paris. Judging from the location of the manuscript copy and analyses of her handwriting (Anne wrote the constitutional documents for the Paris house), scholars have identified Anne Cary as the manuscript’s scribe. Anne’s copy of Julian’s Long Text was intended to conserve the manuscript for the devotional use of her community. Serenus de Cressy, chaplain to the community at Our Lady of Good Hope, supervised the 1670 English printed edition made from Anne’s copy of Julian’s Long Text. Through de Cressy’s 1670 printed edition, Julian’s work reached a wider audience in England and beyond, restoring continuity to Julian’s reception and securing her prominence in a literary history extending from before Anne’s work to today.

From the Traditional Marketing Mix (4Ps) in Sport to New Marketing Mix (3Ps): Toward a Paradigm Shift from Practitioner’s Perspective : من المزيج التسويقي التقليدي إلى المزيج التسويقي الحديث: نحو نموذج جديد من وجهة نظر المما

Alqahtani, Mohammed Huthut Middle Tennessee State University ProQuest Dissert 2020 해외박사(DDOD)

There are four elements to the marketing mix, also known as the 4Ps: product, price, place, and promotion. Marketing mix is a widely accepted theory in sport marketing (Waterschoot, W. van, & Van Den Bulte, C., 1992). Scholars and practitioners have identified several setbacks and limitations with the marketing mix model. This study aims to update the marketing mix in sport by proposing an alternative model developed from the practitioner’s perspective in Saudi Arabia called the 3Ps. There is a significant need for scientific or empirical studies on the practitioner’s perspective. The purpose of the exploratory sequential design is to first qualitatively explore perceptions of marketing practitioners and then to determine if the qualitative findings can be used to study a larger sample. The data collected in this study shows that the 3Ps model has merit and appears to be a viable marketing framework that can replace the long-held marketing mix. It is a comprehensive model that meets ever-changing marketing trends. Marketing practitioners reported appreciation for the model because it was built by practitioners and around the practice of marketing. To the sport marketing industry, the 3Ps is a base that practitioners can build on and customize according to their marketing needs.